‘Birdgirl’ Mya-Rose Craig: Here’s why I won’t be going to Cop27

In September 2020, I travelled to the Arctic aboard a Greenpeace ship with their scientists, looking to find if the ice was at its thinnest in history. We found the ice to be at its second thinnest ever, only beaten by a year when the weather had caused it to be worse.

Photos from that day went viral, being published in 200 news outlets around the world. For me, while I stood there for four hours, it was a profoundly emotional experience. What the photographs do not show is what I could hear, the sound of the sea gushing below the ice, just below me.

Despite my call to various UN world leaders from the ship, nothing changed then and still nothing has changed since. Look at all the weather disasters just in this year alone: especially the floods in Bangladesh – where my Nanabhai and Nanu’s family are from – and in Pakistan where one third of the country was submerged under water, and the record-breaking heatwaves across the UK, Europe and the world.

I believe that the world is beyond the tipping point in terms of climate change, a point from which there is no going back.

Last year, I attended Cop26, which was hosted by the UK government in Glasgow. I spoke on various panels, but the lack of action or leadership from our government was disastrous. The final straw was the proposal agreed by President Bolsonaro of Brazil to end illegal deforestation by 2030, basically allowing him to continue his mass deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon.

I travelled there in 2019, witnessing the Amazon Rainforest being chopped down by unrelenting Bolsonaro supporters, and at one point we flew over the Amazon at night, seeing hundreds of forests burning below. When I left Glasgow to go back to University in Cambridge, I felt totally demoralised and disheartened. Cop26 had failed me and every young person around the world, whether they knew it or not.

Cop26 did agree to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but the countries in the global North are nowhere near hitting this target.

The fact that Cop27 is being held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt is totally unacceptable. The Sinai is totally enclosed and those without entry to Cop27 will be restricted. There is no right to protest, and so it is unsafe for protesters and women in particular.

For this reason, I am not attending and do not recommend attending to any young people, especially women. However, there is plenty of spin from the Egyptian leadership. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said: “I deeply believe that Cop27 is an opportunity to showcase unity against an existential threat that we can only overcome through concerted action and effective implementation.

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“As the incoming presidency, Egypt will spare no effort to ensure that Cop27 becomes the moment when the world moved from negotiation to implementation and where words were translated to actions, and where we collectively embarked on a path towards sustainability, a just transition and eventually a greener future for coming generations.”

There are so many issues that need to be tackled, as a matter of urgency. I do not have much hope, but think that it is important to focus on some of the world’s most pressing problems.

We must stop all new fossil fuel projects and end all existing projects. We must put a stop to all deforestation, whether for logging, palm oil or cattle. We need urgent research into improving renewable energy and new technologies.

What we need from Cop27 is this: to bridge the mitigation gap to help limit global temperature rise to 1.5C, to deliver high-quality and scaled-up finance flows, especially to the most vulnerable, to enhance efforts to implement adaptation measures, to secure finance for loss and damage, and to implement the Paris Rulebook to hold countries and non-state actors accountable.

We must see this action now, so that vulnerable countries across the world get what they need.

Mya-Rose Craig, also known as Birdgirl, is a British-Bangladeshi ornithologist, author and campaigner